Bringing meaning to the semantic web

What is the Semantic Web?

Here at Integrity, we are all about standards – particularly new standards. In case you haven’t heard, there has been a lot of buzz revolving around the idea of the “semantic web“. So what is the semantic web, you may ask? It is not actually one “thing” but a collection of technologies that are all designed to bring meaning to the web. While traditional websites are all about content – images, text, etc. – semantic web technologies are all about meaning, relationships, and describing things in a way that a computer can understand and process.

Sound complicated? The thing that makes the semantic web so difficult to grasp is the fact that it is so abstract: it is an idea rather than a specific technology. That idea is to look at all the “things” that we can find on the Internet, classify them, describe them, and describe how one “thing” is related to another “thing.”  Consider the example of an individual’s resume. A person (let’s call her Janet) may create a resume for her potential employers with information about her education, skills, certifications, and previous employment.  Janet goes to a job fair and hands her resume to one of the lovely people at ACME, Inc. The hiring manager may read her resume, read another resume, read her resume again and call her in to negotiate a salary. Awesome.

Instead of having a paper resume, suppose Janet creates a resume webpage. That’s great, but the the internet doesn’t know it’s a resume. Search engines and web browsers can look at the content of the page, but they cannot say, “Aha! That’s a resume.” Imagine an internet where Google could tell you not only that a certain page is a resume but that it is Janet‘s resume and that Janet is an SEO guru who knows Bob, who worked at WitgetCo, who supervised Ted, who lives in San Francisco enjoys watching Braveheart and knows a little bit about SEO himself. Awesomer. That is what the semantic web is trying to achieve: describing things and connections in a way that computers can understand and grok.

Case Study: Google Recipe Search

In February, 2011, Google added Recipe Search to its array of search tools. Now a hungry Googler can search for “beer battered pickles” and find something like this recipe. Moreover, they can see immediately that it only takes 10 minutes to make and that they need to go to the store to pick up some canola oil and ranch dressing. With this technology, Google can know that a certain webpage is a recipe, and it can pull out certain properties of the recipe, and it can categorize those recipes.

Under the hood, Google is looking at web pages that have microformats, or microdata embedded in them that describe certain properties of a recipe (title, author, cooking time, ingredients, etc.). It can then organize the recipes according to each property that it knows about. Want to find all recipes that contain walnuts, and cranberries and take under 15 minutes to make? Done.

Why is this important?

As the web continues to grow at an impressive rate, we need to find new ways to efficiently sort through all of the data that is “out there”. The semantic web would make it possible to explore only information that is relevant to you. If you are an employer who is hiring, you could go to a search engine, type in all of the qualifications of your ideal employee, and 3 seconds later you could have the email address of the best person for the job. Or, if you are a hungry fried pickle fan, you can indulge your cravings with a level of ease you never though possible.

While semantic web technologies are in their infancy, they have enormous potential. It will be interesting to see how the internet evolves into a more meaningful place.